The present invention relates to the terminal/port selecting function in a bridge having a plurality of connecting ports and adapted to mutually connect networks in, for example, internal LAN and more particularly to a method of managing virtual group information for performing regulation of connection between terminals in virtually prepared groups of terminals.
In recent years, the terminal/port selecting function in a multi-port bridge having a plurality of connecting ports has been used for performing management of connection between terminals and a description of this function is given in international standard ISO/IEC 10038 ANSI/IEEE Std. 802.1D. To describe the function with reference to FIG. 12, in this function, an input port 202 of received data and a bit map 203 of a port to which the data is transmitted are set in correspondence to a MAC (Media Access Control) address 201 for terminal/port selection by using the manager function, and connection regulation (forwarding or blocking) of the data is determined in accordance with the contents of the above setting.
Disadvantageously, for example, when terminals having addresses specific thereto, that is, MAC addresses are divided into two groups A and B, it is very difficult for the aforementioned conventional method to realize regulation of communications between the two groups by only the terminal/port selecting function and besides setting by the manager function is complicated, because the conventional terminal/port selecting function is effective for a mere aggregation of regulations of paired connection and a transmission destination is limited by the selecting function effected by a port.